1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed and claimed herein generally pertains to a method for generating and using constraints associated with the installation or use of software related products in a data processing system. More particularly, the invention pertains to a method of the above type wherein respective constraints are generated from product metadata that is available in one or more databases. Even more particularly, the invention pertains to a method of the above type wherein respective constraints can be used to determine whether or not a product use or installation will result in a fault condition.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is well understood that when a software product is installed, it can only be run on a machine or platform that is capable of supporting it. Typically, such products, or components included within such products, have minimum requirements or constraints that must always be met, both for installation and for subsequent operation. These constraints may include the amount of disk space that is needed, the types of memory that can be used and other minimum hardware requirements.
As an example, WebSphere software products are products of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), wherein WebSphere is a registered trademark of IBM. WebSphere products can only be run on certain specified platforms, so that a large number of constraints apply thereto. Moreover, if an installation includes two or more software products that must work together, further constraints are imposed. For example, both of the products may need to be of the same version level, in order to enable the two products to communicate with one another. As a further illustration of an important class of constraints, a customer computer may have only a dial-up Internet connection, and not a DSL or other high speed connection. Thus, an application that required a high speed connection could not be used on the customer computer.
Minimum requirements and other constraints for software related products are generally available in various databases, and may also be found in manuals and other hard copy materials. Accordingly, when such information is needed, it is manually accessed from these types of sources. This may require little effort if only a small amount of information is needed, such as the version number that is required for a particular product operating system. Very often, however, a substantial amount of requirement-related information must be found and accessed. This is nearly always the case, when it is necessary to identify all the constraints that apply to installation of a complex software system or configuration. All such constraints must be discovered and complied with, in order to ensure that the system is correctly installed and properly used. At present, an efficient and automated mechanism for acquiring all relevant constraint information for a complex system is generally not available. As a result, such acquisition tasks tend to be very tedious and time consuming.